Speeches by Pollard.

“At the moment, the system works in terms of the structure and there is an understanding of who has responsibility for what. What I think the SDR sets out clearly is the fact that we have under-invested in our homeland defence and under-invested in, or have not really adopted, a whole-of-society approach to meet the thr…”

“The Ministry of Defence will be involved with all of those, but it is for the CDL to make his statement.”

“We were involved in the work that underpins some of that, but, no, I have not yet seen every word of his statement.”

“First, I would challenge you: I do not regard it as slightly concerning in the way that you framed it in your question, mainly because I have spent most of today either here or preparing for here. I have not been looking at other aspects of my portfolio because I have been in front of the Committee. I am not worried ab…”

“Cadets are led by the Minister for Veterans and People. I can write to the Committee with the details of spend against our commitment to increase cadets by 30%, which we set out in the SDR. The full implementation of that is with my colleague Al, so I am happy to write to the Committee, because I am not across the full…”

“Yes. The SDR set out that we want to do more to improve our article 3 role, homeland defence and national security. Some of those are shared endeavours. If I take the example of cyber-resilience, we have restructured some of our cyber-capabilities since the SDR by creating a new cyberEM command and looking again at the…”

“To implement change—yes. Ministers need to set the clear strategic direction. In the MOD, we have done that by adopting all the recommendations in the SDR and driving the SDR consequences. It is not just implementing the 62 recommendations—although we are, and we will—it is also by taking the spirit of the SDR and appl…”

“I can investigate that when I get back to the office, in terms of looking at it. The SDR is right that, if we want to move to warfighting readiness, which the SDR sets out clearly, we will need to invest considerably more in Defence Medical Services. That is a challenge—”

“In some areas, certainly, I have regular conversations with some of our DH colleagues about some of those questions, but I am happy to take that detail away.”

“I might ask colleagues to come in on the details of the metrics. I will take the broader piece about the journey that we need to be on and why metrics are an important part of it, and then I will ask colleagues to come in on the detail. When I came into office, I was quite surprised about some of the poor performance o…”

“Absolutely. It is one of those key bits. If our service personnel do not feel that the offer and their experience in service life is good enough, we know what they do: they leave. That creates gaps and is one of the reasons contributing to the fact that, when we took office, for every 100 people joining, 130 were leavi…”

“I am happy to take that work and look at it, and to write to the Committee. I suspect that the Committee will probably have views, which you can share with us.”

“I can entirely understand where you are coming from. For anything that we seek to publish, there is a difference in what we can track and what we cannot publish. I am very happy to look at the progress of that work to see what might be able to be shared with the Committee in a private capacity, due to the classificatio…”

“The SDR has identified protection of our CNI as an area that we need to do more in. The lessons that we are seeking to learn from not just that incident but others that have happened more recently—Brize Norton is an example—highlights that under-investment over a long period of time has meant that there are greater vul…”

“Securing our supply lines and resilience is featured in the SDR, and it is also important that we implement the spirit of what the SDR tells us. As a Department, we are very mindful that we need to look again at our resilience in the wider sense. That is what the SDR asks us to do in terms of warfighting readiness, hom…”

“First of all, the defence industrial strategy, which will cover some of these points, will be out later this year. Not everything that we intend to publish was in the SDR, because there are elements of detail and focus on sectors for which the defence industrial strategy is probably the better place. Those will be feat…”

“Procurement matters would be matters for Maria Eagle, so I would not be able to answer that question in detail. Certainly, preserving our capability to build high-end combat air platforms is absolutely essential to our national security; that is something that I think everyone here would agree on. It is not just about …”

“As that is a procurement matter, it is not within the area that I look after. I am happy to ask the Minister for Defence Procurement and Industry to write to the Committee with the details, but I do not have the knowledge of that, as it is outside my swim lane.”

“I know the workforce and I know the supply chain, having met many, especially in opposition, when I covered more of that brief than I do today. They are superb and that is certainly the reason why the Secretary of State and MinDPI have been working in this area. It is probably worth saying that a Typhoon buy and an F-3…”

“I can absolutely understand where you are coming from, but it is worth saying that an F-35 is a different platform with different roles than a Typhoon—”